Hi—I am Rob Emanuel from the Microsoft.com Operations team. For those of you who may not know what we do, our group designs, deploys, manages and sustains highly available, highly scalable Web and SQL systems for Microsoft for some of the largest corporate web sites in the world (www.microsoft.com, Microsoft Update, Download Center, MSDN and TechNet). Along with our team’s TechCenter, we maintain a blog on how we adopt our own products and share some of our real world experiences.

For the last several months we have had the opportunity to focus on virtualizing both the MSDN and TechNet websites with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as a start to our overall virtualization adoption strategy. This was a group effort across our entire Operations Team including individuals from the Technical Architecture group I am part of, the System Engineers who run the sites, the data center hosting team which handles our infrastructure changes and the very supportive product group which is responsible for MSDN and TechNet. Today we are very pleased to be able to share how Hyper-V was deployed for those two sites and our lessons learned through that process. We have written an article on the TechCenter which goes through how we approached virtualizing MSDN and TechNet and hopefully conveys how successful we found Hyper-V to be as a web platform.